Photo by Noah Silliman

Letter one: The consequences of learning that being gay is bad

(like “getting shunned, getting AIDS and dying alone” bad)

Dear Past-Michael,

The events that led me to me writing this letter are hard to put in words. Long story short: all that you will do, all the choices you will make, the people you will meet, will create the perfect storm. It will culminate between June 17th and October 28th 2017, a period that will turn your world upside down, and make you realize that you don’t know who you are. Of all the things you are, how many are you always, in any given context? Both in a lunch meeting at work, and in Berghain at 6 am on a Sunday morning? Both at a family dinner, and while giving a lecture? I know it’s not my job title, or my hobbies, as these things change. It’s not feelings or states of mind, these fluctuate. There are very few things that have been constant for as long as I can remember: I’m gay, I’m a man, I’m an introvert, I’m a storyteller and an explorer. But true as they may be, neither of those facts tell me who I really am. That period, that culmination of the perfect storm, is where you turn to I, and I want to find out who I am. I think you can help. I found a backup copy of the on-line diary that you started writing 1997 and reading through I see the entries not as isolated incidents, but as streams joining, and with that ever so slightly changing, the river that is my life. Over time, many things, traits and behaviours have been washed away by the process, but deep down there’s a… you-ness. A me-ness. That core of me that I hope to learn more about from you. I know we are the same, and these letters are is my discovery of that sameness.

Why are you doing this in English? I — we— speak Swedish. I bet that’s the first question that, tinged with a little excitement, pops into your twenty-year-old-mind. English was one of your best subjects in school.

Fact is, I started writing this book in both English and Swedish at the same time. I’ve found that writing something in one language, and then re-writing it in the other helps my thought process. Swedish is easier to start with, as my knowledge and vocabulary is that of a native, but for this book I kept getting stuck writing in Swedish. I think that exploring experiences remembered in a Swedish context through the lens of English makes it easier to sort through thoughts and emotions.

I think this partly stems from a quirk in Swedish, a quirk that removes many Swedes (including you) from being entirely responsible for your feelings and thoughts.

In Swedish, the word for you in the collective sense, is “man” (it also means man, just like in English). When talking, Swedes often replace “jag” — which is the word for I — with “man”. It’s a little like talking about yourself in third person in a way that is socially accepted. I know that at least for you, that created an emotional airbag of sorts when talking about feelings and other uncomfortable stuff. It also created a way out of full responsibility. It wasn’t “jag”, it was “man”.

You have already had this insight, and you believe that you have quit this habit. Yet still, at this point in this letter, you would be less focused on what I’m writing, and more focused on those sixty-something diary entries, wondering how many times you might have done it. You might even have gone so far as re-reading the diary after finishing this letter, to count all the instances and wincing mentally at each and every one of them. Don’t worry, there aren’t that many. The only times you used the collective noun instead of I, was when you wrote something that felt more revealing than you really were ready for. I know that you have had the insight of the power of “jag”, but you are not yet ready to assume full responsibility; your writing style is such that you simply remove the pronoun when writing about yourself. Instead of writing I woke up like this, and I felt great, you write Woke up like this, felt great. Don’t worry, though. It took some time, but today I cannot think of a single sentence about me where “man” would feel natural to say (although I still do it on occasion, when I’m talking about something uncomfortable). I think that the English I feels more powerful because in English, it was never “man” and always I. Using the more powerful version of I to refer to my current self when talking to you is a small, but beautiful detail that I know you would appreciate once someone pointed it out to you. In many ways, you are really smart. In more than a few others, you’re mostly blind and unaware of it.

This vernacular quirk of man instead of I makes it easier not just to distance yourself from any responsibility, but also to humble brag. A result of that, in turn, is that it becomes that much easier for you to compensate for your rapidly declining self-worth with an equally rapidly increasing self-confidence. Would this statement sound true to you? I can’t remember at which point your self-worth started declining. I remember you were so confident, in ways that I’m only now re-discovering, as a kid. You weren’t cool enough to hang with the cool kids, and you weren’t good at sports. We both know that the only reason you got a good grade in gym class was a bet with the gym teacher that sports day in ninth grade. You were at risk of becoming one of the main targets of the school bullies. It shames me even now to remember that you tried to become one of the bullies, so that you wouldn’t be bullied yourself. It’s a small comfort that that plan didn’t work out. But you did find your niche, carved out by countless hours reading Stephen King and Dean R Koontz, and watching pretty much every slasher movie in the video store; it felt a little degrading, hauling the garbage from the video store out for change that wouldn’t even buy you an ice cream cone, but the upside was that you could borrow movies for free. And so you became that weird kid that was a master of Spirit in the Glass, told horror stories and for a while had at least one person stay inside for days because they thought you were possessed and out to get them. At 13, you were less afraid of what people would think than at 26, but I’m not sure when you lost it.

I think that the start may have been your realization that homosexual was not only a bad word, it was also a description of what you were. Remember that time when you and the neighbor boy, both six years old, both naked, looked at each other’s bodies, sporting boners? And your aunt came home? I think that the unadulterated excitement of the situation before she came home etched the scene into your head, and the mortifying shame of whatever happened after erased, well, whatever happened after. Even as a boy, you knew you liked boys.

Since you always had been drawn to boys, your realization was not I like boys. It was homosexual is what you call a boy who likes boys, and that is very, very bad. Like “getting shunned, getting AIDS and dying alone” bad.

You didn’t start to suspect anything until you had been through puberty. Even though you thought about guys — not your peers, most of them hadn’t gone through puberty and so were uninteresting, but older brothers and some dads were… not uninteresting— even though you thought about your friends’ older brothers when you jerked off, it took a couple months before you really made the connection between the feelings you had and the word homosexual.

The connection was in the the horrified whispered conversations of grown-ups about homosexuals and how they got AIDS from having sex. Those conversations were always quiet, as if it was shameful to even talk about the subject. The connection was in the biology book, one of the most common junior high biology books printed in pretty much that same edition until 2007, that your junior high school used — that you found a couple paragraphs about homosexuality. The chapter you found them in was called Variations In Sexual Behavior.

There isn’t much known about the causes of homosexuality. The sexual development during childhood can have been disturbed. No physical causes have been found. In puberty it’s rather common that young people of the same sex have sexual relations. The cause of this could be that the sexual drive hasn’t yet stabilized and this is not considered homosexuality in the normal sense. It also occurs that the sexual drive is aimed towards both your own and the opposite sex. This is called bisexuality.

Adult homosexuals often look for a partner among youths of the same sex. Such a relationship can become a big problem for a young person. It can lead to future disturbances in one’s own sexuality. But you do not become homosexual from such experiences.

It can be difficult to be homosexual in a society where most people are heterosexual. It can be hard to find a partner and get other people to accept that you live together with someone of the same sex.

I remember you, sitting on the left side of the second row, pretending to flip through the book, ready to jump pages if someone as much as glanced your way. You read those paragraphs and saw a promise of a way out: if it is a phase, that means you can get better from it. Although deep inside you knew it to be untrue, you jumped at the smallest chance to avoid the horrible, tragic fate of being a lonely old faggot who couldn’t find someone to love him, and who tried to satisfy his longing for love by preying on confused young people of the same sex. I remember how you, right then and there, started making plans to commit suicide, should this phase not end by the time you turned twenty. To spare yourself and your family the shame of having a pervert in the family, you would jump off one of the ferries going between Sweden and Finland, hoping that your body was never found. It gave you seven years for this phase to fade, and seven years is a lifetime for a thirteen year old. I can see now how it gave you seven years to come to terms with yourself. It breaks my heart to think of the pain and scars that book gave you and thousands of other unstraight kids, but as a wise person, (/u/GSnow on Reddit), once wrote: “Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.”

You think that you have come to terms with being gay, considering you’re twenty and alive. And you have, compared to that seventh-grader. But that’s like shining a flashlight next to a candle. There is so much darkness in you still; so much internalized homopohbia and self-loathing. I don’t think I’m done dealing with it yet. One of your worst fears is that the outlook on life as a gay person from that biology book with green squares on the cover, would turn out to be a prophecy about you.

I know now that reading that biology book was a huge blow to your self-worth. It turned liking boys into being gay and being gay was not just a blow to your self-worth, it was a weird Hadouken-like combo that just kept on hitting. You did not have a father figure, and therefore your view of a man is an average of the few flesh-and-blood-men in your life (except for your sisters’ dad — I know you hate him) and the fictional men in the books you’ve read and the pop-culture you’ve consumed. If parts of that man are blurry, there is one part that is sharp and sure about him: he is not gay. How could you ever be a real man if you were gay? You still don’t have the answer at twenty. I don’t think anything I say will really change it, but in ten years or so you will read a phrase that really resonates with you: it takes a real man to take another man up the ass.

Then we have your dating life, that will further crush parts of your self-worth. I’m sorry to say, but for the next thirteen or so years, that part of your life will be an excruciatingly slow train-wreck, the kind where the train is loaded with shit and crashes into a giant fan. Don’t worry, it ends well, like Hollywood movie well — at least for now.

Your self-worth may be melting away, but you have already begun to compensate for it by tapping into something you have been nurturing for as long as I can remember: self-confidence.

That self-confidence comes from mom. She instilled in you an independence and a firm belief that you have not yet encountered anything you couldn’t handle, and perhaps you never will. You got it from watching her being exactly that her best: an big-hearted, independent, worried and capable of fixing anything. She really is a remarkable woman, even if you can’t see it right now. Your relationship has been on the decline ever since seventeen or so. I know that you’re trying to figure out why, but it has you stumped. Your relationship will improve greatly when you move out in January in 1999, but until then, the two of you will be like two stubborn captains commanding the same boat, each knowing how to do it better than the other. Neither capable of talking about feelings. Turning into your mom at seventeen was obviously a good strategy. She was capable enough to get you to that point, and you are capable enough to eventually get me to this point.

I think that the essence of your early childhood can be summarized in one story. You tell it from time to time, it’s one of your most vivid childhood memories. Remember when you were about six, and mom had to get groceries before the stores ran out? Ration coupons were no guarantee that you would actually get to buy that particular item, they were more a “you might get some” kind of deal. That six-year-old did not understand how much it broke her heart to have to leave her son of six alone, babysitting his three year old brother, because no adult was available. Neither do you at twenty. This was such a fundamental and impactful moment that it’ll be ten more years before you start dealing with its consequences.

That six-year old had a wild imagination and no concept of time. He imagined mom gone forever, but tried to be brave because it meant that he was the adult now, and if his three-year-old brother did not cry, how could he? I can’t remember how long the bravery lasted, or who started crying first, but when mom came home she was greeted by two wailing boys, crying their eyes and hearts out by the front door. I do remember how mad she was at you for crying. For not taking proper care of your brother. I know now that she was mad because of the guilt she felt over having to leave us like that, but the six-year-old only saw the anger (so do you). The relief of not having been abandoned in the world with his brother, was quickly replaced with the deep, deep shame of not being adult enough, of being a crybaby, and a weakling.

When you tell that story to your close friends, it’s is a story of how hard it was to live under the communist regime; so desperate were the times that a good mother could feel forced leave a six-year-old to babysit his three-year-old brother.

You don’t yet realize how much of a blessing that situation was. You have not yet connected it to another powerful memory, that from the first day of pre-school. How you cry when mom leaves you, and the eternity of angst before she comes back to pick you up. That experience lights a bone-deep fear of abandonment on fire, a fire that started burning during your first time baby-sitting, a fire that combined with low self-worth will make you as good at dating as Trump is at being president (I’m sorry to tell you this, but in twenty years, Donald J Trump will be the President of the United States).

Blessing? What are you talking about? I know that you believe this to be a neutral memory. I don’t think early childhood memories ever are; you remember them because they evoked a strong emotion of some sort. So, your real question is How can such strong shame, such crippling fear of abandonment and such a strong feeling of inadequacy be a blessing? I will admit that it has had its drawbacks. Just like every wave must have both a crest and a trough, just like the inside requires the outside to define it, just like one side of the wheel moves up and the other moves down as the wheel rolls forward, there’s paradoxical duality to everything. How could you know what light was if the was no darkness? Up is meaningless if down doesn’t exist. To put it in other words: everything comes at a cost. The higher the cost, the more glorious the potential prize — if you just can turn around inside your head and see it.

So if that story is a perfect summary of your early childhood, you have to consider this:

That childhood resulted in a kid who read novels as a six-year-old, and solved algebra in first grade. Remember how you had to use a pen, because if you used a pencil you could erase any mistakes you made? The school system in Poland at that time did not believe in making mistakes. Nor in playing. I remember how school was done in two shifts, and the days you were on the late shift your schoolday would begin in the afternoon and end in the evening. During break-time you had to silently walk, in pairs, in a circle inside the school building. You hated it, because nobody could give you a reasonable explanation for you why you had to do it.

That childhood resulted in a teenager who went to New York all by himself at sixteen (it was in February 1995) and who became the acting manager of a store later that same year. That’s after he got into a high school-program that required a 4.2 (out of 5) GPA to even apply, and then the 25 or 30 (or however many slots there were) with the highest grades got in.

That childhood gave you a sense of fairness that I’m still very proud of. It gave you a belief that you can handle whatever life throws at you, a belief that was — and still is — so great, natural and therefore obviously invisible, that you won’t see it for another ten or so years. That is what builds up your self-confidence so much, that it compensates for the diminishing self-worth that started with realizing that a homosexual refers to you. It is what fuels your drive to learn so many things, about so many subjects, that your friends will call you Mickipedia. I hope that put like that, you at least begin to glean how much of a blessing it has been.

The cost? You never got to be a kid in certain aspects. Yeah, in many ways you were very much a kid: you had friends and read books and played video games. Or maybe I should say: you read books, and had friends with video games. There were at least two friends you never would have hung out with, had it not been for them owning a computer. You went to summer camp and on school trips and had birthdays and Christmases. You even built a clubhouse in the basement of one of the apartment buildings.

But can you ever remember admitting that you can’t handle something, and that you need help? Can you remember ever being irresponsible? I bet you anything that you would counter this with “that time when you turned seventeen”. Yes. It was irresponsible. You drank a small bottle of vodka in less than 30 minutes, thought that you didn’t feel a thing and took the subway to meet your friends in the city. The alcohol hit you somewhere near the Old Town, where you very drunkenly stumbled off in an attempt to walk the worst off before you met your friends.

Cue to 3 am, in a small alley in the Old Town, where you drunkenly wake up slouching on a stack of pallets, marvelled that your vomit hadn’t destroyed those light brown suede logger boots that were in fashion in 1995. Working in a shoe store meant cheap shoes, and you were a far sharper dresser at seventeen than I am now. Now, waking up like that would have been embarrassing enough, but it’s not the worst part — and you know it. The worst part is that later that night, or early morning as it was by then, you got thrown off the subway at the end station. The train was being taken out of service. You waited on the platform in the early August early morning sun, still very drunk and still not really sure about how you felt or what really happened. When next train came in, you got on, knowing the train would be waiting at the station for however long it was until next departure. The subway cars at this time had a booth-like configuration, with two seats facing two in each compartment. The seatbacks were barely waist high, so you saw across the whole train. There was a drunk older lady sitting diagonally across from you a couple compartments down, staring at you, when suddenly you puked. Not a lot, but enough. That was both the assurance of the destruction of those brown suede boots, and one of the very few times you’ll ever throw up until you turn 39. You didn’t really have the wits about you to move, so you sat there, waiting for the train to leave when suddenly the train driver enters the train car on his pre-departure inspection. You saw the driver approach the drunken lady, who had her feet on the opposite seat, from behind. As he reached her, he said “Take your feet down” in a stern voice. If he was that stern with feet on the seat, what would he do to you? Irresponsible. The lady replied with something along the lines of “You tell me to take my feet down when he sits over there, puking?”. You were half mortified by the situation, half angry at the lady for ratting you out. As if the driver wouldn’t have seen and smelt your shame. The driver looked at you for what seemed a very long time (I’m sure it was all in your head) before he turned to the lady and said “He’s drunk and sick. I can’t help that. But I can help your feet, so take. them. down.” That emphasis at the end may be a slight embellishment, but that driver is still, to this day, a nameless hero in my book. You got home sometime around six in the morning. As the elevator passed the fourth floor on its way to the sixth, you saw two surprised and angry (mostly angry) faces, belonging to two of your best friends. You were supposed to meet them at the Water Festival the night before. You all had made plans to sleep over at your place since you had it all to yourself, and therefore the three of you could get drunk without risking getting caught. And they had gotten drunk too, though nowhere near as drunk as you. Perhaps if they had, they wouldn’t have found sleeping in the stairwell of your apartment building so uncomfortable.

Yes, that was irresponsible. But we both know that it also was neither intentional nor planned. Your secret high school crush and classmate, about to be an exchange student in Ohio the coming school-year, came over with a bottle of vodka and a carton orange juice. He wanted to wish you happy birthday and to say goodbye. As he was mixing the drinks, he made only virgins for himself since he had a family dinner. You, on the other hand, had Screwdriver after Screwdriver until the bottle was empty. It wasn’t until you were walking towards the subway, when you said to him “you must have had a lot of that vodka, because I didn’t feel a thing”, that he told you he hadn’t had any because of the family dinner. You almost didn’t believe him, because you didn’t feel much, but you knew he was from a respectable, upper middle-class family and would never risk getting caught drunk like that. So maybe something had been wrong with the vodka? (No.)

Can you remember intentionally planning something fun, fun in a way that could — but doesn’t have to — become irresponsible? Like having a house-party? Can you remember asking someone for help after thirteen-ish? When can you last remember crying? (On the luxury liner on your way to visit Berlin and meet the mayor as part of that fancy high school program, when your feelings sat outside your skin in that way moderate hangovers can inspire. You were listening to that fancy walkman with a remote control when Foreigner’s “I want to know what love is” came on. How you ached for that young man sitting a few seats away, oblivious of any of this, to show you what love is. You had found half the key in being in love with someone, and you were so sure the other half was in that someone loving you back. You hid your face behind a curtain, pretending to shut out the light to get some sleep, but we both know that was the last time you cried.)

You never got to be a kid emotionally, and you learned at an early age to lean only on yourself. Asking for help was showing weakness. You never showed weakness. Or talked about emotions. These things will cause you bigger problems than you can imagine, because you are — I am — a very emotional person. Okay, but what would talking about those feelings help? Well, for one, you would be able to tell emotions apart. To understand their nuances. Perhaps then you’d understand that part of what you channel as cockiness and anger, really is insecurity about whether you are a real man. When you finally understand that, you will be able to turn that insight into action: actively finding out what being a real man is to you.

But at this point all this would confuse you, because your strategy for another ten or so years to deal with many, if not most, of your feelings, is to control them. It’s the strategy you learned from your first babysitting attempt. You control every feeling you can, willing it to exist or to not exist. This works to a certain degree. It also fails a lot. There are feelings that die in their infant stages from too much willing them to exist. Love. Lust. You will learn this.

The feelings you cannot control, you channel into whichever of the invulnerable feelings that lies closest, those states in which it is very hard for you to be hurt by someone. If you’re happy, and someone hurts you, you can laugh it off. If you’re angry, you’re the one doing the hurting. You take all your sadness, guilt, hurt, insecurity, anxiety (and boy, do you feel anxiety) and channel them as anger. I mean, dude, you recently wrote a whole diary entry about how angry you were because Stockholm Marathon forced you to bike a different route to work. Sure, it’s a ‘funny angry’ kind of post written as much for your online-diary audience as for yourself, but I remember that anger you felt. It was real. It was intense. And that part-bitterness, part-loathing, part-despair you feel about being gay? You know that you can’t hide it, and so you channel it as an ironic, self-deprecating woe-is-me tone, like in this diary entry following a second dating drama in a short period:

I have realized what I want my tombstone to say. “At least he had luck with jobs.” It is probably the most true thing about me.

You wrote that in the same entry where you wrote how you just signed for a job at Ericsson Data. It was a huge milestone in your early career, and you managed to make that achievement into a self-deprecating joke about a date that didn’t work out. You are so afraid that Karen Walker’s quote “it’s funny ’cause it’s true” applies to that joke. (Don’t worry, you’ll understand the reference in about a year or so.)

Writing this, I realize that I still have that particular humor you display here; that phrase you wrote is not an entirely incorrect summary of Bo Burnham’s “Make Happy”, which is one of the best stand-up shows I’ve seen eight times. And a place where I’ve found more than a few insights. You will love it it more than you’ll love his first show “What”. And you’ll love “What” more than Ali Wong’s “Baby Cobra”. I realize that I’m about to get stuck in explaining some weird relativity scale based on how much you will like my current three all-time-favorite stand-up shows, so let me get back to that anger. You don’t realize that you have so much of it, and that it has begun turning into hate, hate projected on that part of yourself that seems to be causing you most of your suffering. It’s like a perverted 2-for-1 offer: suffer and get the meta-suffering free! You can’t contain it when you get drunk. For every beer in, some self-loathing oozes out.

The second time I can remember you crying in public after leaving boyhood is that time at the student pub. The despair to at least find a clue to, if not a cure for, your suffering had led you to question whether things might not have been different if your biological father had been around. Or even a father. That conversation with your friends Jimmy and Zsofia brought up so many emotions, emotions that you normally would have channeled as anger, but fortunately for you, you get sad drunk and not angry drunk. And so the feelings you normally would have channeled as anger came out as tears. You were so drunk you didn’t care at that point. It is very impressive to be so coherent when you’re that drunk, by the way. I haven’t realized until this exact moment how imporant your friends reactions were. Jimmy worked as a bouncer and was one of those straight guys so comfortable with themselves and their sexuality that “gay” is a non-issue. He was probably more fine with you being gay than you were at that point. I now realize that he also was a beacon of hope for you. If a straight guy can be so comfortable and relaxed around the gay thing that he can se past it, maybe so can you? In many ways, he was the type of man that you aspire to be: stoic, strong, funny, fair and kind. When you cried he listened, comforted and encouraged you to talk more. You cried in public that night, and it will be January 2009 before you cry in public again. I think it would have been longer, had Jimmy not showed you that it’s okay for you to be sad and vulnerable and a man.

Here’s another example of when you could not bury the alcohol-agitated darkness. After a night of partying and however few hours of sleep you got, you wrote this blog entry:

Hated myself. Or rather, hated the part of that gets turned on by guys. Wished, for I don’t know which time in a row, that things were different. Felt that that wish was a betrayal of everyone who is gay. Felt disgusted by the superficiality at gay clubs and was mad with myself for not being able to look at it objectively. Felt lost, didn’t belong anywhere. Still don’t belong anywhere. Learned that I feel this all the time, but keep the feelings in check most of the time. Except for moments like this one. Went to bed and let sleep sweep the thoughts away.

Woke up with that same feeling. It burned inside me, a feeling of disgust and hate towards a part of me that I cannot get rid of. The novelty was not the feeling, I live with that all the time. The novelty was the intensity.

Side note: You think you understand the depth of your control over your feelings, but you’re really John Snow here. When you see Brokeback Mountain in eight years or so, it will touch you so deeply you’ll end up obsessing over it a bit. You exert such control that you barely bat an eye in the theater, nor in the thirty minutes it takes you to get home afterwards. As soon as you close the door to your studio apartment, you will break down and cry for three hours, much in the same way you did that summer night in 1989, when you came home for the last time from the summer camp you had aged out of.

Back to the topic at hand. With the realization that homosexual is not only something that society deplores, but also who and what you are, you got a perfect projection screen for all those feelings you now channel as anger and hate. I know that you are doing your best to fix it. In a while, you’ll stop drinking alcohol for a couple years, because you can’t handle the darkness unleashed by too much alcohol at the wrong time. That’s by the way another impressive control feat from you: managing to appear sober when you’re shitfaced. You have already met many people that could have sworn you were almost sober, when you actually were in a state almost as drunk as your seventeenth birthday. You will learn that control is a mediocre tool that comes at a very high cost. You can prepare and plan ahead, but you can’t control things that haven’t happened and maybe never will. You might do a mental-eye roll now, thinking Right, old wise man, what else do you want to tell me? That water is wet? I know that you know it when you turn twenty, but you don’t understand it. You don’t feel it. It will take you another 19 years, 10 months, 11 days and a couple hours from writing that diary entry before you do.

I know that you still sometimes think about that homosexuality-as-a-phase-thing, and play with the thought of being offered a pill that would make you straight. It’s a testament to how much you hate that part of yourself, when you can dream about literally anything — including all the hot guys being gay and into you, and the world being completely fine with gay people — the only dream available to you is one where you erase a vital part of what makes you, you.

What prize could possibly be worth this suffering I feel? The answer is so simple, and so may sound so cliché and simplistic that before I get to it, you must know this: I’m not trying to make you change anything about yourself, because you are on the path to finding your answer to that question. I just want you to know that I understand the full price you have paid for it thus far, and how much more you will keep paying for it for years to come. The prize? Realizing who you really are. But each thing has its own time, as the Swedish proverb goes, and this particular thing is for a future letter, when I’m ready to tell you.

Rarely talking about feelings, and even more rarely expressing them, doesn’t make them less intense. Your control of feelings is fully automatic now, and you squash those you can before you consciously realize they’re there. Those you can squash, you channel as either ‘happy’ or ‘angry’. Every time you do this, it makes it that much harder to untangle it later. Just because you feel something doesn’t mean that you can name that feeling, let alone describe it. You need to be able to name feelings to sort them, to untangle them and to convey them. When we’re born, we are capable of feeling a rainbow of emotions, but unable to tell them apart. As we grow up, we learn to identify and name more and more complex feelings. This is anger. This is sadness. This is love. This is lust. What is happiness? Humans are born capable of such rich emotional lives with endless nuances. As we grow, our family and society teach us to identify and name some of those feelings. The labels are an attempt to create stable borders around certain hues of specific feelings. It’s oversimplifying and controlling at the same time, but we need ourselves and others to be predictable, to be stable and feelings aren’t. They are in constant flux, mixing, waxing and waning, creating mixes we can only feel and never name. But we need to have predictability and so we say this is ‘love’ — or rather, we describe how love makes us feel and act, and hope that everyone feels and acts the same in love — and create a handy and simple label. We took one of the most powerful emotions we humans are capable of, and put it a straightjacket designed by some Nordic minimalist collective named Borg. This is why we can love so many different things. Partners. Hobbies. Children. Movies. Knowledge. Ourselves. Putting the label ‘love’ on that potent an emotion is like watching videos from a sunny beach instead of being there. You feel in technicolor, but are only able express it in the same monochrome hues as whichever Ericsson mobile phone you have at this point. I think this is why you can’t write anything longer than a blog post, let alone a book. An author must be able to evoke feelings, and to evoke feelings, you must first know them — not just feel them. You write what you know, hence your diary entries are either happy or angry. Writing these letters to you is part of paying that price: by looking back on these experiences and trying to remember what that tangle of emotions really consisted of, I better understand who I used to be and why. I think the process will make me a better writer and hopefully a better author.

So, I know the price you have paid, and will pay, I’m not trying to neither downplay it nor exaggerate it.

I think that what I want to say is: it was worth it. This is one of the few things nobody could have told me. I just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones. It’s like being in love, which you have been at least once at this point. You just knew it, and that feeling was so strong that it made you start questioning the truth you had learned in the junior high biology book. This is the same. I’ve never been happier in my life, and I don’t think that any amount of money could improve this feeling.

I can’t help but wonder, had you been better at sorting through your feelings and talking about them, had the journey been easier? I don’t think so, not easier. Different for sure, but the price must always be paid.

It’s getting late, it’s 2:49 am and I have to go to bed, so I should finish this letter. Reading through it, I realized you asked about the language and got a psychoanalysis for an answer. Don’t you love it when that happens?

Love,
Me

This is a semi-finished chapter of a book I’m writing called “Letters From The Person I Needed When I was Younger”. Once it’s finished — the planned release is in 2018 — it will be available as paperback, e-book and audiobook on Amazon. All chapters will be available for free here on Medium, and if you want to support my writing it (and support keeping it available for free) you can help me in any of these ways:

• Pre-order my book: https://kazarnowi.cz/preorder-my-book/
• Share this book with others. Here’s the link for the index of the book here on Medium.
• Help me edit this book. If you see mistakes, or something that doesn’t make sense, send me a note. You can highlight any part of the text and leave a comment on that part.